43 pages • 1 hour read
Meredith MayThe Honey Bus
Meredith MayNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Swarm”
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses abuse and depression.
Ten-year-old Meredith May drives with her grandfather, a beekeeper whom she calls Grandpa, to take care of a bee swarm on a private tennis ranch. Meredith has lived with her grandfather for five years and has become familiar with the seasonal patterns of beekeeping. Each spring, neighbors call her grandfather to remove swarms of bees from chimneys, trees, and walls. Although Meredith cannot read the street signs, she knows that Grandpa is speeding. When they arrive at the site, the bees are swarming around a buckeye tree. Grandpa explains that the bees are swarming because their queen has left the hive, and they are desperate to protect her. The bees begin to form a tight ball around a specific point on the tree, and Grandpa tells Meredith that the bees are surrounding the queen to keep her safe.
As Grandpa prepares to collect the swarm, Meredith feels something buzzing on her neck underneath her hair. As the bee stings her, she feels more bees collecting in her hair and begins to panic. Meredith suddenly smells bananas, which she recognizes as the bees’ emergency response signal, and realizes that she is under attack. As the bees begin to sting her more aggressively, Meredith faints. Grandpa catches her and begins to pull the bees out of her scalp. Once he is certain that she isn’t having an allergic reaction, Grandpa returns to work on the swarm.
On the drive home, Grandpa congratulates Meredith for being brave during the attack. She thinks about the bees’ desperation to find the queen, their mother. Without the warmth and support of the hive, a single bee is unlikely to survive. Without the leadership of the queen, the hive cannot survive. Meredith empathizes with the need for family; after her parents’ divorce when she was five, Meredith’s mother fell into a deep depression. Meredith began to follow her Grandpa everywhere, and beekeeping has taught her valuable lessons about nature, perseverance, and family.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Flight Path”
Five years earlier, Meredith witnesses a violent fight between her parents as her mother throws a heavy pepper mill and a baking dish full of food at her father. Meredith runs to her room and tries to remember when her family fell apart. She considers showing her parents pictures of themselves as newlyweds, hoping that they might remember why they fell in love. They were married in California in 1966, and they relocated to Newport in 1970. They had Meredith and her brother Matthew shortly after.
Despite their beautiful home and family, Meredith’s parents are obviously unhappy. Meredith’s father’s is at risk of being laid off and spends most of his time in the living room listening to the Beatles by himself. Meredith has overheard her mother complaining that she feels trapped in their marriage and that Meredith’s father is not an equal partner in their relationship. Meredith feels as if she is walking on eggshells around her constantly fighting parents.
Suddenly, Meredith is woken by her mother, who tells her to pack a bag and change quickly. Confused, Meredith grabs her favorite stuffed animal, Morris. Meredith’s mother explains that they are going to visit her parents in California. Meredith is cheered by this news; she has fond memories of Granny and Grandpa visiting her in Rhode Island. As her father drives the family to the airport in silence, Meredith’s brother Matthew falls asleep on her shoulder. Meredith is grateful for his unconditional love.
At the gate, Meredith is horrified to learn that her father is not coming with them to California. Her mother pushes her onto the plane, and Meredith watches her father watch their plane depart. Meredith’s mother chain smokes and cries on the plane, and Meredith thinks about all the times that she watched her mother put on makeup. On landing in California, Meredith senses a shift in her mother, as if she has given up on being a parent.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Honey Bus”
Meredith arrives at the Monterey Peninsula Airport with her mother and brother to find Granny waiting for them. Although Granny looks like a reserved, extremely proper woman, she immediately comforts Meredith’s mother, who seems to revert back to being a child. Granny drives the family along the tallest mountains that Meredith has ever seen into the Carmel Valley. Meredith thinks that the valley looks like a secret garden, and time seems to slow as they approach.
Granny and Grandpa live in a red house on an acre of land surrounded by tall trees forming a privacy hedge. The lot is scattered with toolsheds, abandoned vehicles, farming equipment, and a miniature-city of honey beehives. As she explores the property, Meredith is drawn to a large green military bus surrounded by vines and wild plants. Inside, she discovers the large metal basins and machines that Grandpa uses to extract honey from the combs and process it to sell. She draws closer to the machines but is interrupted by Grandpa, who brings her out of the bus and locks the door.
Inside, Granny shows the family their new shared room. Meredith regrets leaving Rhode Island and struggles to imagine sharing space with her mother and brother. Meredith’s mother immediately climbs into bed and refuses to leave it for the rest of the day. Meredith struggles to sleep that night and thinks of her father. Over the next few months, Meredith’s mother spends most of her time in bed while Granny patiently nurses her emotions. Meredith and Matthew spend most of their time outside, exploring the property and acclimatizing to life in California. Meredith learns more about her grandparents, who met in their forties after Meredith’s mother was born. Although Meredith admires her grandmother, a stylish schoolteacher, she senses that her grandmother resents her on behalf of her father. She longs to be a part of her grandfather’s beekeeping business and watches him closely as he works.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The novel’s narrator, Meredith May, is 10 years old in the Prologue and five years old when the novel begins. Although Meredith is aware of the violence of her parents’ relationship, her young age also protects her from certain painful truths, such as her mother Sally’s mental health and the reality of her parents’ divorce. The memoir reflects Meredith’s innocence by pointing abstractly to these issues, rather than addressing them directly. The memoir’s description of her mother suggests that she experiences mental health crises. On the night that they leave Rhode Island, Sally “whizzed” around the house frantically packing for her children. May notes that she’s done this before: “[S]he’d shake us awake in the middle of the night, hurry us into snow pants and hats and mittens” and “scurry around the house packing” furiously (27). The use of the rhyming verbs “scurry” and “hurry” highlights the frantic energy of these episodes. May’s father’s response to Sally’s crises suggests that he anticipates they will be followed by depressive episodes. He would wait until “she tired herself out” and then talk in a “low soothing voice” until Sally gave up and went to bed (27). As a five-year-old girl, Meredith does not understand that these episodes are evidence of her mother’s mental health condition. The narrator’s refusal to explicitly identify her mother’s mental health episodes reflects her relative innocence as a child.
When the family arrives in California, Meredith’s mother takes to her bed, claiming to have debilitating migraines. Meredith’s belief that migraines are the cause of her mother’s time in bed also reflects her relative innocence. The memoir suggests that Meredith’s mother is suffering from an intense depressive episode: during “three months of bed rest,” Sally “refused” all the food that Granny offered her and “complained of sore muscles” (46-47). Although young Meredith does not recognize it, a lack of appetite and muscle soreness are both symptoms of mental health conditions. The fact that the memoir points obliquely to this fact, rather than identifying her depression explicitly, reflects young Meredith’s innocence in 1975. Her understanding of the realities of her mother’s mental health condition changes as Meredith grows older over the course of the novel.
This section of the novel introduces Meredith’s grandparents, whom she calls Granny and Grandpa, as central characters in Meredith’s life. Granny and Grandpa are very different, and Meredith believes that these differences are the root of their happiness: “[S]he liked to lead and he, adverse to confrontation, willingly followed” (51). Their differences are manifested most clearly in their greetings when the family arrives in California. When she sees Granny at the airport, May describes her as “an exclamation point of perfect posture, jutting above the glut of less-mannered travelers flagrantly kissing their relatives in public” (35). Granny’s reserved, stuffy nature is contrasted with Grandpa’s “Willy-Wonka-like” nature (41). Meredith’s playful, physical relationship with her grandfather offers a stark contrast to her stand-offish, more formal relationship with her grandmother. Granny and Grandpa act as foils to each other throughout the memoir.
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